She stirred her coffee slowly, inexplicably adding sugar, tasting it and promptly dumping it in the sink before returning miserably to her office. Delivering the news to Callanach of his full-pay, non-disciplinary, temporary suspension the previous evening had been stilted at the start and entirely one way by the end. Utterly confused by what she was feeling, Ava had ended the call coldly before weeping furiously, alone in her office.

She’d returned to her own home only long enough to shower and change. Sleep, at least that part of it that required you to lie quietly trying to relax with only your thoughts for company, was the enemy she was avoiding at all costs.

Callanach had accepted his fate without complaint and Ava had known he wasn’t thinking about either Bruce Jenson or Gilroy Western but trying to keep a lid on the memory of his previous suspension in Lyon, France, when he’d been not only removed from duty, but also arrested for a rape he didn’t commit. In spite of the harshness of her words with him, she was sure about that one thing: Callanach was no rapist. Still, the deaths MIT were investigating bothered her. If two men conspired to rape a woman she cared about, her own now-deceased mother in her thoughts, Ava knew she’d have stopped at nothing – absolutely nothing, consequences notwithstanding – to have destroyed them. If Callanach had managed to show the restraint he’d claimed in Bruce Jenson’s presence, it would have been a miracle.

Her desk phone rang and Ava picked it up absent-mindedly.

‘Turner, it’s Overbeck. Are you there?’ she snapped.

‘Yes,’ Ava mumbled. ‘Sorry, trying to do too much at once.’

‘That’s all right,’ Overbeck said. ‘It’ll come as no surprise to you that I’ve just had a visit from DS Lively. I thought he might really have a heart attack this time.’

‘I was hard on him,’ Ava said. ‘I can understand why he’s angry. I’ll apologise.’

‘Stupid girl. I’m not phoning to discipline you. You’re his superior officer and he had no right to challenge you in that manner, particularly in front of the rest of the squad. If you hadn’t given him such short shrift, you’d have been in for an absolute bollocking from me. How did Callanach take the news last night?’

‘Quietly,’ Ava said.

‘Hmmm,’ Overbeck drawled. ‘Hierarchical relationships are complex little buggers. I don’t think Lively’s going to be gracing me with his after-hours company for a while.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ava said awkwardly. Overbeck’s relationship with Lively was always the elephant in the room.